In this Author-meets-Reader roundtable, Martine Sonnet will discuss her work alongside 3-4 scholars working on French-language filiation narratives. Filiation narratives reflect an effort to recover aspects of one’s family history which were not transmitted to the author. The quest for information, garnered through various possible sources, is then incorporated into the narrative. We invite scholars working either on a filiation narrative subgenre or on Sonnet’s work in particular. Papers may be delivered in French or English.

Le récit de filiation ouvrière is but one identifiable subgenre. Others include the récit de filiation d’immigration, for example. What are other filiation narrative subgenres and how do they differ? Are the differences merely topical or do they extend to the structural or rhetorical, for example? What broader socio-economic or socio-political implications might the telling of economic or migratory challenges engender?